gat

some loyal subjects by reserving good things for them which are denied to others. We have been
wrestling with many other aspects of class- and caste-based government and society ever since we
came out of this period.
Evidence that this movement was organized to concentrate power within a Brahmin caste stratum
is caught by the sudden ostracism of Jews from the ranks of America’s leading social clubs in the
decade and a half directly following Herbert Spencer’s visit to America. This was far from
business as usual. Jesse Seligman, a founder of New York’s Union League Club, was forced to
resign in 1893 when his son was blackballed by the membership committee. Joseph Gratz,
president of the exclusive Philadelphia Club during the Civil War, lived to see the rest of his own
family later shunned from the same place. The Westmoreland in Richmond boasted a Jewish
president in the 1870s, but soon afterwards began a policy of rigid exclusion; The University Club
of Cincinnati broke up in 1896 over admission of a Jewish member. The point is whatever was
wrong with Jews now hadn’t been wrong earlier. Who was giving the orders to freeze out the
Jews? And why?
The striking change of attitude toward Jews displayed by Bostonian blue blood and author Henry
Adams is a clue to where the commands might have originated, since the Adams family can be
presumed to have been beyond easy intimidation or facile persuasion. Adams’1890 novel
Democracy illustrated the author’s lifelong acceptance of Jews. Democracy featured Jewish
characters as members of Washington society with no ethnic stigma even hinted at. In 750
intimate letters of Adams from 1858 through 1896, the designation "Jew" never even occurs.
Suddenly it shows up in 1896. Thirty-eight years of correspondence without one invidious
reference to Jews was followed by twenty-two years with many. After 1896 Adams seemed to
lose his faith entirely in the Unitarian tradition, becoming, then, a follower of Darwin and Spencer,
a believer in privileged heredities and races. H.G. Wells’ The Future in America (1906) called
attention to the transformation the English writer witnessed on a visit to this country: "The older
American population," said Wells, "is being floated up on the top of this immigrant influx, a sterile
aristocracy above a racially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat...." That fecundity and
that racial difference dictated that a second American Revolution would be fought silently from
the Atlantic to the Pacific about a century ago, this time a revolution in which British class-based
episcopal politics emerged victorious after a century and a quarter of rejection.
Divinely Appointed Intelligence
All through the British colonial history of America, the managerial class of these colonies was
drawn from Church of England gentry and aristocrats. As you might expect, this leadership shared
the British state church’s creative distaste toward education—for the underclasses. And
underclass then was a term for which the customary narrow modern usage is quite unsuitable.
Every class not included in the leadership cadre was an underclass. The eye-topped pyramid on
the back of our one-dollar bill catches the idea of such an episcopate beautifully: divinely
appointed intelligence ruling the blind stones beneath.
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